For many years, pay telephone owners have relied on employees or contractors to collect money from their pay telephones by traveling to a plurality of pay telephones, by emptying coins previously deposited in the pay telephones, and by transporting the coins back to the owners. Unfortunately, some of the "collectors" have been less than honest and have stolen large amounts of collected money from the telephone owners. Such theft has been enabled, in part, by the unsupervised access of the collectors to the money and by the absence of any accurate records as to the exact amount of money previously deposited in the pay telephones. Without accurate records, the owner of a pay telephone could not determine whether or not any money had been stolen by a collector. Such theft has also been enabled, in part, by the absence of coin-handling devices designed to prevent theft of money by the collectors. In some older pay telephones, deposited coins fell into open-top hoppers within the pay telephones for keeping until the coins were dumped out of the hoppers and transported to the pay telephone owners by collectors. With unsupervised access to the hoppers, the collectors could brazenly pocket all of the coins from the hoppers or could pocket a portion of the coins from the hoppers, thereby "skimming" money from the owner of a pay telephone.
In an attempt at stemming this theft problem, the manufacturers of newer pay telephones have incorporated into each pay telephone a security-sealed, coin receptacle box which resides in a steel-reinforced vault within the pay telephone and which receives coins accepted by the pay telephone. To collect the money from the pay telephone, a collector removes the coin receptacle box from the phone's vault, inserts an empty coin receptacle box into the phone's vault, and transports the removed coin receptacle box to the phone's owner. The coin receptacle box is manufactured from steel and has a tamper-resistant cover with an opening that allows accepted coins to pass from the phone's coin handling mechanism into the coin receptacle box for temporary storage until the box is replaced by a collector. The cover has a pivotally-mounted metal door which automatically rotates into a first position to cover the opening when the coin receptacle box is not within the vault of the pay telephone and which automatically rotates into a second position to uncover the opening (i.e., allowing accepted coins to pass through the opening) when the coin receptacle box resides within the vault of the pay telephone. By limiting access to the coins within the coin receptacle box when the box is outside the pay telephone, the metal door makes it difficult for a collector to gain access to the coins within the box, thereby reducing the opportunity for theft of the coins.
Such prior art metal coin receptacles are known for their strength and their resistance to bursting upon impact (it frequently occurs that the collector accidentally drops the coin receptacle). Unfortunately, such metal coin receptacles can be expensive and can require expensive tooling to manufacture. Moreover, by their nature, metal coin receptacles are prone to corrosion in certain environments. Importantly, metal coin receptacles, although resistant to bursting upon being dropped, upon being dropped can be permanently deformed to such an extent that the coin receptacle cannot be fitted back inside the coin vault of the pay telephone. This is so because the coin receptacles are closely matched to the size of the opening of the coin vault. Therefore, any slight change in the shape or size of the coin receptacle can prevent it from being reinserted into a pay telephone.
Accordingly, it can be seen that a need yet remains for a coin receptacle which is inexpensive to manufacture, which has excellent resistance to damage from being dropped, and which is resistant to corrosion. It is to the provision of such a coin receptacle that the present invention is primarily directed.